The Machineries of Madness
Book Review: Asylum by Patrick McGrath
Originally published in Creative Loafing. I am reprinting some of my early writing here, which is no longer available online.
The gothic novel isn’t dead; it’s just been floundering. Horace Walpole unwittingly created the gothic mode in 1765 with his bizarre little novel, The Castle of Otranto. Novels like Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Lewis’ The Monk soon followed. These novels possessed dark, desolate settings replete with ghostly figures and tortured minds.
Since then, writers like Shelley, Hawthorne, Poe, and, today, Anne Rice have all been influenced by the gothic tradition. Horror sprang from this genre, as did, arguably, science fiction. Plundered for its elements by the romance novelists in this century, however, the gothic novel has fallen out of vogue. Writers like Patrick McGrath and Bradford Morrow (who together in 1991 compiled The New Gothic, an anthology of recent literature in the gothic vein) currently are spearheading a resurgence of the gothic novel. Now McGrath follows the success of his earlier works — The Grotesque and Spider — with Asylum, a carefully wrought novel that combines all the traditional elements of Gothicism with a modern understanding of the machineries of madness.
